


Homeward Bound

by Coffee_Reveries



Category: Normal People (TV 2020), Normal People - Sally Rooney
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29089851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coffee_Reveries/pseuds/Coffee_Reveries
Summary: Their paths converge once again in Carricklea seven long years after Connell's departure to New York.Title based on the Simon & Garfunkel tune.
Relationships: Marianne Sheridan/Connell Waldron
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23





	Homeward Bound

The day Connell Waldron once again stepped foot in Carricklea it was just a few days before Christmas. Lorraine was already standing at the door, as was his Nan who came by bus all the way from Cork to see him.

He got out of the hired car and opened the backseat door to unbuckle Oona, who stared back at him with eyes swollen and wide-eyed from having just woken from her sleep. The flight from New York had been nearly seven hours long and the drive home made it even longer, though her eyes feasted on the Dublin buildings and streets as they passed them. Eventually she fell asleep to the sound of an old James Taylor album he played on his phone and Connell was able to just concentrate on the road ahead.

He thought about the many times he’d been on this same trajectory, mind racing with dialogues for his writing or calculating in his mind the amount of money he would need to cover his rent and petrol. It was a period of such turmoil and worry… Sometimes Connell felt like his early twenties just flew by him like a leaf caught in the wind. Except for when he was with Marianne.

He’d never meant for his return to be postponed as long as it did, by a total of seven years. Obviously he’d been back home to visit his mother and she in turn had flown to New York twice to visit, the last time being four months ago when she managed to convince him it was time.

Connell was just Connell still. Speaking out in public nearly killed him every time and somehow he still struggled with words. As for writing, however, there seemed to be no struggle. For all intents and purposes he’d become some sort of best-seller hipster-sensation, _a contemporary cult classic_ , as the New Yorker magazine described him on one of its covers. One of his novels was adapted into a film, Saoirse Ronan playing the titular role and the money from sales had been enough for him to live a comfortable life in his two-bedroom Brooklyn flat with his daughter and their succession of goldfishes named Murphy.

Obviously fatherhood wasn’t something easy and the fact that he went about it solo gave him an entirely different appreciation for his mother. He could no longer imagine life without Oona, though, with her curls and blue eyes just like Lorraine’s.

Returning to Carricklea. He’d contemplated it many times and many times he’d been able to concoct decent excuses as not to. But then came this current book he was working on that was absolutely killing him. And then, of course, there were also the memories of the past that plagued him-- a heart-aching nostalgia that turned his entire comfortable existence upside down.

He'd seen her one evening. Marianne Sheridan.

She was the reason New York suddenly felt suffocatingly not his home. He'd seen her leaving a lecture hall at Columbia University following an international seminar on Cultural History the past October.

She’d had this air about her, of confidence and grace. Marianne was always elegant and she was all at once just as Connell remembered her, though simultaneously completely different, starting by her signature fringed haircut and the well thought out outfit that made her look like the most fashionable of academics. She wore glasses though, a vintage style with tortoiseshell frames.

Waiting for Marianne to look up from her phone even for a slight second was the most agonizing minute of his life. He hadn't wanted her to see him but at the same time he hoped she would.

Weeks later Lorraine arrived in New York to visit, going on and on about how she could help him better with Oona if he returned to Ireland, that it was no good spending so much of his money on renting that shoebox of a flat. And then just days after she returned home to Carricklea came a phone call, Lorraine sounding breathless and distressed. She told him Marianne was in Carricklea taking care of family affairs. Denise, her mother, had passed away suddenly.

To be completely honest it wasn't Lorraine who convinced Connell to return. That was just something he kept telling himself and others in order to seem like less of an idiot. In fact, Connell’s actual reason was that the minute Marianne disappeared in the midst of that crowd exiting the lecture hall he knew he just had to find her again, to talk to her, to look into her eyes to see if she was all right. To see if that crazy, desperating feeling of love and want was still there.

Connell had truly never loved anyone like he loved her. It took him ten years to make peace with that startling fact. There was a hope inside him, utterly irrational and idiotic even, that perhaps Marianne still loved and waited for him too.

Finally he passed the ocean, the waves crashing against beige sand, the color of the water a deep cobalt due to the gray of the sky. He pulled up into the little terraced home he was raised in. He felt something akin to butterflies flutter in his belly.

"Hello, loves. How I've missed you!" Lorraine exclaimed, arms wide open to embrace him and Oona both, his daughter's arm slung around his neck.

"Oona-bird, are you excited to spend Christmas with your Granny?"

To anyone else the sight of 45 year old Lorraine calling herself a granny might look absurd. Oona could very well be her daughter, four years old as the little girl was.

Oona propelled herself into Lorraine's arms relieving Connell of her weight. He, in turn, embraced his grandmother who stood there with tears in her eyes and let her kiss him.

"Welcome back home, lad."

"Thanks, Nan. How are things?" His grandmother smiled.

"Oh, nothing extraordinary… I'm nearly done with all the Christmas jumpers though." 

Cecilia Waldron pointed to her basket full of half-finished sweaters and wool skeins sitting by the armchair in the lounge.

"Are you like Mrs. Weasley, then?" Oona asked her, eliciting a good laugh from them all.

"I suppose I could be, though I don't have a magic wand!"

…

Connell stretched as he finished editing a chapter his editor had been pressing him on. The bedroom was as it had always been. Faded plaid blue wallpaper with a tiny wooden desk and the twin-size bed nestled against three walls like a cozy alcove. He tried not to think about Marianne Sheridan, and how she felt nestled in his arms in that bed, a perfect fit in every sense. He closed his eyes and released a deep sigh, the tiredness of his long journey home settling into his muscles and bones. As he breathed in again he could almost smell the scent of her, a faint hint of vanilla with something stronger he couldn’t name.

"They're thick as thieves already, are they not?" He heard his Mam’s voice coming for the doorway, motioning to her own bedroom that was occupied by the sleeping Oona and Nan Cecilia. "She was so excited to meet her great-grandchild…"

"What have the doctors said?"

"Well, just that chemo and radiotherapy are no good anymore, it's spread already. She's taking some meds for the pain and to retard the spread though… Other than that she's been right as rain actually. She's made peace with it."

Connell just nodded, there was really nothing he could say to make it better. He could see the pain in Lorraine's eyes.

"You haven't said a word about your new book…" She changed the subject.

"Stuck still." Lorraine nodded, sipping the last of her tea.

"Maybe it's a good thing. You've been writing and publishing like mad the past years, nearly a novel or short story collection per year… Must be exhausting."

"I just feel like there's nothing to write about at present. My days are cooking, cleaning and running after her, making sure she's enrolled in a decent school, that she's well-fed, that she's not spending too much time on the games or telly…"

"You don't feel like she's keeping you from _growing_ , do you?"

"Did you feel that way? With me, I mean."

Lorraine paused for a long moment.

"I won't lie because you're a parent now and you know the feeling. There were hard days, like. You were always a very good boy but around the time you were three we went through this awful phase... You cried day and night and were so clingy. You wouldn't go even with Nan. It was impossible for me to do anything outside the house… I managed to get some money doing calligraphy for wedding invitations but it wasn't enough. I did think about it sometimes, how different my life could be if I finished school and went to uni. Like I might've had a better job… But then I thought how that would mean not having you and I just…” Lorraine sighed deeply and shook her head as if chasing away a thought. “From the minute you were born you were my whole life Connell, there’s nothing in this world more important to me than you." And then she laughed, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “It’s not a very feminist thing of me to say but I think that the only reason I exist is to have brought you into this world, like you’re my personal little Jesus…” she teased at the end, reaching out to pinch his cheek.

“Jesus, mum.” He said with a cringe.

“I’m just so proud of you in every way…”

Grown man as he was, her words still moved him and made him blush. Lorraine gave his cheek another pinch and was about to walk out the room, headed for the sofa-bed downstairs when he asked out of the blue:

“Have you seen Marianne lately?”

Lorraine turned around and looked at him pointedly and Connell swore he could see her battling with her inner self so as not to roll her eyes.

“She lives in Dublin, mostly, but comes here like once, sometimes twice a month. She’s trying to sell the Sheridan house but it’s this big fight with her brother.”

“How did they find her? Denise I mean.”

“Alan came home and Denise was there in her bedroom, dead. Swallowed God knows how many pills. There was a letter and everything. He threw it away but she’d sent an email to Marianne also. What kills me is that she’d been planning it for some time. Even in death she was cold.” Lorraine was never the religious sort but in talking about Denise Sheridan she felt the urge to cross herself. “I don’t know any more details. What I know is what I read in the newspaper and from the little I heard from Marianne herself during the requiem mass.”

…

Marianne Sheridan wandered the dark corridors and rooms of her childhood home like she’d done many other times since receiving news of her mother’s death. The tips of her fingers slid along the walls passing spots where frames, mirrors and portraits once hung. After Christmas she would have to empty the house of the last bits of furniture and boxes so that the new owners could start their rehab to move in. It would be some sort of spa and retreat and no longer a home, though in Marianne’s experience it was never much of one to begin with.

It was a shame though, such a beautiful house, everything so tastefully decorated by her equally tasteful mother through the years. But the walls were a cool, icy blue-gray, much like Denise was and much like they all were under this roof.

She turned the doorknob and entered her old bedroom with the same sparse furniture and the same windows overlooking the back garden. She remembered her little self in that garden many, many years ago hunting for ladybugs and bird nests during the warm months. She sighed as she fell onto her bed.

As if on queue her phone lit up and vibrated in her dressing gown’s pocket. She slid it out and her eyes hurt from the brightness of the screen. The name ‘Jonathan’ was spelled out along with a picture of herself with him, taken last summer during a trip to Vietnam.

“Hello?” She answered, her voice feeling strange as it echoed across the room. Marianne then realized ‘hello’ was the only word she’d said all day.

“Finally! I was beginning to think you disappeared off the face of the earth!” Jonathan was an American and usually as kind and extroverted as they came. He had an inherent tendency to be self-centered, however, even he tried to express his concern for others. “I’ve been missing you, babe.”

Marianne lacked the energy to roll her eyes at the much-hated term of endearment. He was well aware that she couldn’t stand it but kept on calling her babe as though that was just one of those quirky, bantery things some couples did.

“I’m fine… Just packing boxes all day.”

“Well, we’ve all been missing you. You should’ve waited until after Christmas, I told you. It’s supposed to be the happiest time of the year and you’re all over there in the land of depressing and gray with the ghost of your mom in that house.”

Marianne scoffed. His insensitive words caused an acid feeling to threaten going up her throat. Jonathan was becoming rapidly unbearable and Marianne wished he would just magically forget she existed and move on.

“Umm, I think I’ll just get ready for bed now, it’s been a long day with my mother’s ghost as you said. Goodnight.” Before Jonathan could say anything else she hung up on him, throwing the phone inside her nightstand drawer. As she lay there, just the moonlight streaming in from the curtains all wide open the way her mother hated when the heating was on, she tried to think of the few happy things that happened in this house.

Marianne recalled her fifth birthday when her smiling mother had come in with a pink bicycle with a giant ribbon attached to it. She thought of the sickly blue-eyed kitten who appeared one day and who she took care of in secret, keeping him hidden in the attic inside an old sewing basket. She’d named it Hedwig because she’d been big on Harry Potter at that age.

And then there was Connell and the memories of her heart beating wildly in her chest, the mortifying giddiness that overcame her each time she heard the sound of his car pulling up against the gravel in the days he’d come to fetch Lorraine. She’d always had a soft spot for him, a crush one might call it. 

Connell was gloriously handsome in face and in body, though beyond that Marianne felt he was different from the other boys in town. Connell was smart and sensitive. Perhaps the best day of her life was the day that he kissed her downstairs. There were pages and pages of her diary back then dedicated to his kissing her and the way her whole body supposedly tingled and she thought she might float straight up into heaven and die a happy death.

She wondered if he truly was coming back as Lorraine said he was. And then embarrassment suddenly washed over her as she remembered just why they’d drifted apart. Connell had gotten some girl pregnant and all Marianne could think of was how he’d do the right thing, the thing his father didn’t do and marry her, forever leaving Marianne in the past.

The last she’d heard of him was an email he sent her the day after his baby was born, a little girl by the name of Oona. An Irish name for an Irish baby he’d said. The picture attached was of him holding her wrapped in a soft blue blanket, her tiny reddish hand wrapped around his little finger.

With that email came the shattering realization that Marianne had lost Connell forever. Her regret over choosing to stay in Dublin instead of going with him to New York weighed on her consciousness even now. What good had she done staying behind anyway? If Marianne hadn't then that baby wouldn’t exist and perhaps today another baby would exist in her place-- a baby that was hers and Connell’s and beyond that, a present and future that they could have shared.

She stared up at the ceiling, at the shadows cast by the street lights on the trees dancing against the white plaster. She wondered if he still thought of her just as she still thought of him.


End file.
